A thing a week 2022, week 40

As expected, the glamour shots have arrived! She shoots better than she looks in person and I was able to capture some of her best angles almost purely by accident. Usually it's the other way around but more glamour shouts can be found on flickr for interested parties.

This was a very challenging build and though I'm happy with the result, I'm far from satisfied. She ended up at about 73" at 96 hours in a month. There were 20 work days logged which averages to just under five hours per work day. That's nuts and what added to the stress of finishing. 

The good stuff first. She's awfully sturdy. The other giant build I worked on this year (not shown) taught me some very important things about building large and building sturdy which I replicated here. This was reciprocated since I'm using the same stands and the same connection type (slotted into the keel) and learned some top tips for doing it better. I also think I did some good shaping near the back and on the conning tower and some reasonable detailing in the middle area with the negative space. The engines in particular are good, and probably the best part of the build even though few folks at BrickCon ever saw those.

The bad stuff is too much to enumerate here. Because of her size and the time crunch felt nearly from the beginning, a lot of the details are off. The proportions of the aft section are wrong as are the nose bulby-things and the big fins. The nacelles need to be separated better from the aft section by structure or color. The color blocking isn't particularly good. All of those things have good solutions but not easy ones and not ones that I'm ever going to get to since I've already started disassembly. 

If this weren't SHIPtember and done at the last moment from BrickCon, I would have fixed all of those things and probably added more details, but we don't live in that world. I hit the point of "I just want to be done" too many times and too early in this build for it to ever have been great, but instead of dwelling on that, I think there are one or two angles that are legitimately good and I've taken away a couple really key learnings. The most important of which is "don't build so danged big for SHIPtember."